Hampshire Records on Ancestry.co.uk

Ancestry has just added some new records to their database, thanks to Chris Paton at http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.nz/ for letting us know about these. Amongst the new additions are some records for the county of Hampshire. I chose Hampshire because I was born in the county and have ancestors who lived there for many centuries. However this exercise would produce results regardless of which county you are interested in.

Using Hampshire, England in the location box and leaving all the other search boxes empty I came up with quite a list. It should be remembered that doing a name search for your ancestors may not bring forth all these different datasets as some of them aren’t indexed and have to be searched page by page as you would if you were using the original documents in an archive. Also some of these datasets will only be found under the Stories & Publications tab search section. There was mention that Ancestry was going to blend all their datasets together so that they came under the main search form, but I’m not sure if this has taken place yet.

Hampshire Extracted Parish Records. It is unclear as to who the compiler of this dataset is. At one time I thought it must be the LDS, but now I am not so convinced. The description of what it contains is rather hazy, but it is indexed so will come up on any name searches. These are transcripts and not very complete ones at that.
Anyway the dataset contains the following –
1.Southampton – Calendar of Apprenticeship Registers, 1609-1740
2. Marriage Licences Allegations, Bishop of Winchester, 1689-1837
3. Marriage Licences, 1607-1640
4. Marriage Licences, 1669-1680
5. Register of Marriages, 1559-1812

Hampshire Allegations for Marriage Licences, 1689-1837. I am almost 100% certain that this book which was published by the Harleian Society in 1893 and edited by William J. C Moens has been abstracted and included in the above Hampshire Extracted Parish Records dataset. Use this dataset, it is scanned images of the original publication and is much fuller in content than the Extracted Parish Records. It appears to be indexed, but is in alphabetical order anyway and is divided between Brides and Grooms. There are Addenda at the end of each section and also indexes for both brides & grooms.

Pedigrees of the Families in the County of Hampshire.Published by Sherwood, Gibert and Piper in 1833 and compiled by William Berry this book is not indexed and is based on manuscripts held by the British Museum and private individuals and also on information given by the present (1833) families. It starts with a list of the Sheriffs of Hampshire from the reign of Henry II (1154) and then goes onto the pedigrees of the county families. These pedigrees are not in alphabetical order, but there is an index at the end of the 374 pages which is alphabetical for the first and second letter only. Well worth a browse.

Life of William of Wykeham: sometime Bishop of Winchester and Lord High Chancellor of England : with appendices. This looks as if it might be rather dry reading, but if you have any connection with William of Wykeham (1324 – 1404) and his life then it would be worth a look. There is an index at the back of the book and the book has been indexed by Ancestry so should come up in name searches.

Black’s Guide to Hampshire published 1897, this book seems to be indexed by name, but I think it’s real value is in providing background information for the places where Hampshire ancestors lived and worked.

The diaries of Dummer: reminiscences of an old sportsman by Stephen Terry of Dummer, published by Unicorn Press, 1934. If you have any links to the village of Dummer and it surrounding area then browsing this book might be fruitful. It is indexed by names.

A General History of Hampshire. Written by James S. Virtue this book is again excellent background material, there is no date of publication given.

Gundry genealogy: covering the ancestry and descendants of George Gundry of Hampshire County, England and Genesee County, Michigan. Interesting if you have any connection to the Gundry family. there are charts and an index.

The Pedigrees of Lloyd of Dolobran, Montgomeryshire; The Wordsworth Family; Foster, late of Le Court, Hants; Hanbury of Holfield Grange, Essex; Wakefield of Sedgwick House, Kendal; and Wakefield of New Zealand and So. Australia. Obviously the author liked short, snappy titles !!! If you have the Foster family or Le Court, Hampshire which is near the village of Liss then this is the book for you.

The above datasets are ones that I picked out to be definitely about Hampshire, there are plenty of others where there is a mention or reference to Hampshire and these might well be of interest. There were 210 different datasets that came up in my Hampshire, England search, some were nation wide datasets such as census. My recommendation is to take the time to learn how to use the Card Catalogue then I am sure you will spend many happy and productive hours researching the results.

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About Me

History, particularly Family History is my passion. I have worked in libraries & archives, I teach family history, conduct workshops and give genealogy presentations. It seemed a shame to have all this knowledge & experience and not share it with others, so this website was born.